Oskar Kool’s name did not come up in the record. Yet he must have known Rosita very well, and the man did have a motive, even if it came years and years after the fact.
Ray’s description of him was pretty accurate. Despite being in his late sixties, Kool wore his hair long in the back, short in the front. His skin had the parchment cast of someone who’s smoked roll-ups all his life. When I found him, he was outside chopping wood.
“So? Have you heard the news?”
The old man didn’t react. He didn’t say yes or no, but just stared back at me dourly, clutching his ax.
“I understand you’ve come into a nice inheritance. Haven’t you?”
“What you want from me? If you’re looking for a handout, I can tell you right now that you’ve come to the wrong place.” He swung the ax high in the air and split a log with a mighty crash, spraying wood chips all over the front of my coat. I took a step back.
“I’ve come to talk to you about Rosita and Anna. I am Ray Boelens’s attorney.”
“Ray Boelens.”
“You know him, don’t you?”
“A nice boy.”
I felt my face brighten. “A nice boy?” I repeated. I’d been hoping all this time to hear someone say something positive about Ray, the way a rejected lover sits waiting by the phone even though she ought to know better. And here it was—the phone was ringing at last.
“That’s right. Until he went and hacked them to death.”
“Right.” Wrong number. Foiled again.
Kool lived in a small farmhouse, though “dump” might be a more accurate description. There were holes in the thatched roof and the woodwork was begging for a coat of paint. The farmyard was littered with machinery that looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the sixties.
He put another log on the chopping block and brought the ax down. It struck me how shiny and clean this piece of equipment was compared to everything else, including Kool’s dirty overalls. The log split into two.
“You’re one of the first to say anything positive about him.”
Again he didn’t respond.
“Funny, though. I mean—you just called Ray Boelens a ‘nice boy,’ ” I tried again.
“He shouldn’t have done what he done. That goes without saying. But she did make him nuts. Just like her mom. Both of them knew exactly how to suck a man dry.”
I didn’t know what to say. But Kool’s tongue had suddenly come loose. “Don’t get me wrong—they was good women, both of ’em. But you had to know how to handle ’em, like a stray dog. You never knew what you were going to get. Are they going to love you, are they going to leave you, bite you or lick your hand? It’s looking to be a cold winter,” he went on without pausing. “They can say all they like the earth’s getting warmer, but my bones are telling me something else.”
“Do you have a fireplace?”
“Wood stove.”
“Cozy.”
“It helps with the heating costs. I couldn’t care less about the coziness,” said the new millionaire.
“Have you lived alone since Rosita’s mother passed?”
“Yeah. Not all the time. But grief ain’t sexy, now, is it? Well, at first, maybe. Especially after Rosita and Anna died. Women want to take care of you and take away your pain. They want to bake you apple pies and pour you a drink. They want to talk to you for hours at a time. So you keep rehashing the same old story, and you get to know exactly at what point they’ll start sobbing. But after a month or so, they decide you should get over it. Time for the weeping and whining to stop. They wanna start having some fun. Fun? Who’s in the mood for fun?” He spat for emphasis. A brownish gob of spit landed less than a foot from my suede boots.
“So why do you think Ray killed Rosita and Anna?”
Oskar Kool put down his ax on the chopping block. “I already told you. She drove him crazy. She was a looker and she could wind that boy around her little finger. She knew how to wangle a new couch out of him and then a new TV. ‘Prezzie from my next-door neighbor,’ she’d tell me, beaming. ‘You don’t get something for nothing,’ I told her. ‘You’re making the guy horny as a tomcat.’ That made her laugh. She claimed Ray gave her those things because he didn’t have anything better to do with his money. ‘I give him a pat on the head once in a while,” she said. ‘He’ll just have to be satisfied with that.’ ” Kool shook his head. “Just like her old lady. Always take, take, take. But return the favor? Don’t hold your breath.”
“It doesn’t sound very romantic.”
“There’s no such thing as romance. You’ll find out yourself someday.”
“Did you know your late wife had an uncle, Richard Angeli?”
“I met him once. At our wedding. Elisa didn’t have much to do with him. Except they did exchange Christmas cards.”
“And Rosita? Did she know him?”
“She was at our wedding, so she must have seen him there. But the family wasn’t particularly close. To tell you the truth, my wife didn’t have much to do with Rosita, either. Though maybe it would have been different if she’d been around to know the little kid. I bet she’d have loved to show off a little granddaughter.”
“Did your wife know Richard was rich?”
“She did tell me once her uncle had plenty of money. But that’s all,” he said, nonchalant. Too nonchalant? I wondered.
“He certainly had plenty of money.”
Oskar Kool picked up his ax again. He had a tattoo of three dots between his thumb and forefinger. “He sure did.”
“The money should come in handy for fixing up the farm.”
“I guess so.” He put another log on the chopping block. It was clear that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. Wood chips started flying in all directions; I could see the sweat breaking out on the old man’s forehead. He acted as if I was no longer there. I realized that if I wanted to get him to keep talking, I’d have to find another subject.
“Did Rosita have any enemies that you know of?”
“Hmm.” He scratched his chin. I noticed those three dots on his hand again. “I don’t think folks were particularly crazy about her. But enemies, that’s a big word.”
“What about friends? Did she have any friends?”
“I guess. But—not really. Take the day she moved into her new house on Queen Wilhelmina Street. Do you think anyone came to help her? No, old Oskar was the one to come to the rescue. Whenever something in the house needed fixing, she’d know where to find me, too.”
“So she had no friends, and no enemies, either, and you were her handyman. Did anyone else ever visit her, then?”
“Ray, of course. And that shithead. Asscher.”
“Anna’s father.”
“Father’s a big a word for someone who gets a woman pregnant and then leaves her holding the bag.”
“But he did take care of her, didn’t he? Didn’t he come over sometimes?”
Kool sniffed loudly. “What a prick. Rolling in dough, but doing the right thing? Don’t hold your breath. Things were different in my time.”
“Isn’t it possible someone else killed them?”
He smiled scornfully. “Yeah, in your dreams. Boelens done it. No doubt.” He picked up his ax and started hacking away like a madman again. It wasn’t difficult to picture him wielding a carving knife. Was he capable of committing murder? Of committing cold, calculated murder on the vague expectation of a fortune somewhere down the road—unless he’d also given Rosita’s biological father a helping hand, which was quite possible, too. In which case he’d been remarkably patient. Eight years! And he was far from being a spring chicken himself.
I stared at the three dots on his hand. I’d noticed the same kind of tattoo on a good number of our criminal cases. There were varied explanations for it. It was commonly thought to mean “Fuck the police.”
Inmates gave it to each other in jail.